One of those nights where I wanted to spend an hour working on a site – you know, really quick-like – and I ended up spending 3 (count’em – three…) hours f@cking with my MAMP server.
I’ve got several folders of sites on my local computer, and I switched from one I had been working on recently to another new folder of a site I had just downloaded. And in my MAMP dashboard, MySQL was working fine, but Apache would not start.
Three hours later and lots of testing, let’s just skip to the answer – the enclosing folder (not the actual html docs folder I was pointing to in the MAMP prefs, but the enclosing folder) had an accented character in the folder name. Yes, like the accent over the “e” in frusté, for example… (Or perhaps more to the point, emmerdé)
This may be obvious to the Linux heads, but to a Mac user like myself, it took hours of narrowing down the problem. Add to that the fact that MAMP/Apache would not reset even after you changed the folder it looked at until you actually restarted MAMP (i.e. using the MAMP button to cycle the servers did not help).
Sigh. Now I’m where I wanted to be… oh, 3 hours ago?
Thank you … You SAVED ME HOURS. My document directory had been deleted so MAMP was refusing to start the Apache server. I just had to point MAMP to the new directory.
Hi Thanks for sharing that, saved a few big headaches! Very useful. Stu
Apache wasn’t starting for me. I had to check My Preferences -> Sharing. I had a bunch check for some reason. I unchecked all but file sharing and now it’s working for me.
Yeah, system prefs if web sharing is on seems to prevent apache in mamp. i guess this is due to two apache instances running on same… ports? i dunno. anyway turning off web sharing got it working.
thanks for these notes peeps.
Great one, your hours saved us lots of hours:)